I sort of figured that out for myself (I haven't tried it yet). But my goal is to never boot up a Windows computer again. Is it planned that we will be able to import sessions from 3.0 without having to boot up Windows and export as XML? It seems like that ought to be part of 4.0

.SES files will not be natively supported in this release, though the XML format will be. We tried to get that word out earlier in the year. There will potentially be tools to perform batch conversions of old sessions to compatible formats available as we get closer to release. In the meantime, if there is a session from Audition 3.0 you wish to open in this beta, please save it as an Audition XML session in Au3 first.

I realize this is a beat release. However with a long history of .ses files associated with Adobe Audition going all the way back to 1.5 the official release of this really must be able to read the older sessions. Having to go back to an older version and re-save in another format is too cumbersome.

So are you saying that. No in the beta we wont be able to inport old .Ses files. but we can expect something like that in the release version?

Was talking to (and showing) My production manager Audition 4 yesterday. He was saying that we should upgrade to it when it comes out. Problem is, at work we currently use Audition 2.0. And 2.0 doesnt have the the .XML option.

Just a thought. I understand this is a Beta. I just hope we see an option for .Ses and .Sesx in the release. (at least in the windows version, if there is one)

There will not be native support for .SES files in the official release. We are exploring alternate methods for converting legacy session files to the new .SESX session format and I hope to make more information available in the near future. I would not be surprised to see third-party solutions appear after release once an SDK is made available.

Given the many users of CEP / AA, backward compato for ".ses" files to at least AA 1.5 is an essential.

AA is the industry standard for so many radio producers and the thought of having to do a workaround with a third party program just to open archive sessions is stomach churning. Surely - at this beta stage - there's the option of including a native solution to this - like Batch Processing for legacy .ses files?

O.K. Perhaps I should have put it this way... there is no point in me buying this Mac version if I still have to run Windows to load the hundreds of sessions I have. If I have to run 3.0 in Windows... then I might as well work in 3.0 which did everything I've ever wanted to do. This seems so basic. Why would I want to switch to software that breaks with the software I have been working with for more than 5 years?

It's like if Photoshop 5 decided that it was going to replace .psd files with something new and wouldn't even load .psd files, but instead required the user to load up Photoshop 4 and export each layer of a .psd file to a .tiff file. and then reassemble those in Photoshop 5.

Backward and cross compato b/t Intel Mac & PC should be a given in all DAW software. I get the whole commercial argument of 'forcing' users to upgrade - but where does that leave the long time user of CEP and AA?

You can add me to the pool of people who think the lack of opening older sessions is absurd. This should be a requirement for software that has been around for this many years.

I use Audition every day, both personally and professionally as a sound designer for video game development. I have been using it since it was simply Cool Edit for Windows 3.1 and eventually became Cool Edit Pro (released in the mid-to-late nineties). I have been multi-tracking with Cool Edit Pro for well over 10 years since the feature was added.

I would like to point out that THE CURRENT RELEASE of Adobe Audition v3.0 sessions DEFAULT to saving a .ses session file. It has been that way since Cool Edit Pro v1.0.

I have over 10 YEARS of old sessions - old and new - that I would love to open on the Macintosh.

I also have experience programming on both Windows and Macintosh. While the platforms are different, there is absolutely NO REASON that Adobe cannot engineer a method of opening or importing "legacy" sessions originating from earlier Windows versions. The ONLY data that is "incompatible" within the .ses file format is the file paths to the audio files used in the session. That can EASILY be remedied and engineered. The simplest implementation would be to intervene the session loading process and ask the user to select a file path to link media against. Windows file paths can be converted and/or stripped in order to attempt to search for matches based on file names (and/or directories).

Other cross-platform audio, graphics and video applications are perfectly capable of opening documents which require separate asset linking. Files across multiple platforms can be relinked in applications from competitors AND EVEN some of Adobe's own products. Linked audio, graphics and video assets can be re-linked when the file names match.

Asking users to hand-convert over 10 YEARS of legacy session data in a separate operating system - one session at a time - is absurd. There is no good reason for Audition on the Mac to be prohibited from opening older sessions.

Perhaps you can help me. As many users on here I have a good 5-7 years of .ses files on my windows pc. I have taken your advice and saved about a dozen of them as .xml files, have moved them over to my mac, and have discovered that not a single plugin has loaded- not even the native EQ's or compressors.

Is there a way to fix this? It is one thing to shift your file format to promote upgrades, but if I cannot load a session on my mac that with the plugins whach I had completed on a PC, this software appears litterally usesless to anyone who is not a first time user.

why not just create dry/wet stems as needed from the old stuff and go from there? I've migrated from daw to daw plenty of times in my career and its just far easier to bang out tracks/stems on the few items you really need (and it's probably less than you think), and just leave the rest behind. I have piles of old CEP/early Audition work on hand but never touch it anymore, if I need it I'll fire up the old version. I keep all of my template sessions as wet/dry stems anyway to avoid just this issue.

There is some additional work being done with the Au3XML import to support additional parameters, so the implementation in the public beta is not complete. However, it will not be possible to create 1:1 translations of many of the effects as additional parameters and channelization options were introduced into most tools.

I don't want anyone to feel the lack of native support for legacy sessions was an easy decision, or one reached without considerable thought and discussions with our pre-release users and some of our close customers. We are continuing to investigate solutions that will make this transition simpler and better. I hope to have more information to share soon.

Would you mind sharing some information about the sessions you have and the cases where you revisit them? What scenarios require you to bring up legacy sessions and what, if any, modifications do you usually perform? Are these old sessions archived together or are they spread about various locations or media? Would you benefit from a single batch conversion process?

I need to be able to go back to a Session that, rather I or previous Producers, have created for a client. Where the client wants to run an identical commercial that they did say 2 years ago. Cept I need to change the dates or minor information. So Multitrack info needs to be the same as the original.

Or in a second scenario, I need to be able to take a commercial where I access a session that was created in the past. Only to change a few prices, everyday, or more information on a monthly basis.

and I suppose the last scenario would be If I'm doing music mixes for Imaging, I would like the ability to open a legacy session to change and mixdown certain elements with or with out transitions (aka stingers or other sfx) that are used in the session. But again effects need to be maintained in the original state.

My only concern with a batch conversion tool, is that it would need to be able to go into sub directories and save the .sesx back into the same folder as the original. But I would only want to have to select the entire Drive (containing the works of the station since the purchase fo Cool Edit, or the original Audition)

I hope that last part made sense. I don’t want to have to re-organize all the new .sesx files back into the folders I expect them to be.

Also, the XML file transfer system wont work for everyone. The station I currently work at has only Audition 2.0. and it hasn’t been in the "budget" to upgrade to 3.0. But with 4.0 around the corner, an upgrade is looking very possible. Problem is, our 2.0 systems don’t have an option to .xml export.

Professionally, I revisit past session archives to review elements that can be re-purposed in new work. Sometimes it's multi-tracked voice over and/or foley recording, some times it is multi-tracked sound design (to video when we have it). Archived project sessions are stored across multiple network shares.

Personally, I have many years of music multi-track recordings -- finished or unfinished -- that I worked on in Audition. They are spread around a couple of computers and external drives. Audition 3 is perfectly capable of loading up these old sessions. Throughout the years I've been perfectly able to get nostalgic and load up old stuff.

I can understand the want or need to have Audition (Mac) version SAVE out a NEW session file format. However, the best case scenario shouldn't need to go through a different process of opening a session. File > Open Session could (should) still load up legacy Cool Edit/Audition session files (to the best of it's ability), but saving and opened "legacy" session would force the user to save in the newer format. Then there is no need to run any sort of batch convert. The user can read legacy sessions on demand. If a change or save is desired the new format is forced

Partial-success is better than nothing. I haven't relied heavily on the real-time track effects and automation features in my work - so simple session asset, track configuration, volume/pan/cross-fading would get me "nearly all the way there", making me happy. I can't speak for anyone else though.

Worst case scenario (besides having zero access to legacy sessions), some sort of separate application or process that handles the conversion one at a time through a user interface. At least console applications can be scripted to do batch processing.

Finally, the inability to load legacy sessions makes it really difficult to put the new Audition through it's paces and actually test great work that has already been done in previous versions. Will Audition on the Mac handle some really complex, sound design to picture session work I've done that has LOTS of tracks and LOTS of assets? I can say I'm not about to undertake any new projects in the beta to find out. Therefore, the inability to load up existing or archived work makes the Audition beta a 'toy' to test and play around with to me.

I think you guys are missing out on some great beta testing. Building stuff from scratch can take a long time with a new app. There's no reason we can't put the new Audition through it's paces with old projects that have already been completed.

Would you mind sharing some information about the sessions you have and the cases where you revisit them? What scenarios require you to bring up legacy sessions and what, if any, modifications do you usually perform? Are these old sessions archived together or are they spread about various locations or media? Would you benefit from a single batch conversion process?

I have been in the process of recording an album for a while now. Over the course of time I have improved as a mixing engineer, and have also picked up a Mac.

I live about 30 minutes away from my studio, and I have always worked on mixes there, but I have my mac set up at home.

I saw this release as an opportunity to shift all my work over to my mac where I can work at home and not be in the studio. All the plugins I have invested in are on both machines, and I don't see why there should be any difference when I load a session file on my mac from my PC.

A scenario that comes to mind is this: All sound is relative. When you lower the volume of a guitar to sit farther back in the mix, you may reduce whatever compression you have on the track to assist you. So a temorary solution- if I were only interested in what would essentially be a pre-master secondary mix- would be to bounce each individual track with the effects on the pc, move them to the mac, then alter the volume. But that's not what I am interested in doing.

I don't have any intention of going back and looking at 7 years of recordings- I have almost 300 completed tunes- some of which have no hope for them. However, there are several which were recorded very well, and just need some TLC in the mixing department. I would like to be able to do that mixing from my Mac, but in order to do that, the plugins need to migrate with the tracks. True, perhaps some of these will get replaced in my quest to better the tune, but I have no plans of starting the mixing from scratch, but rather just improving what I already have.

A batch file conversion system would be fantastic- but only if it carries ALL the metadata. I'll sooner drive the 30 minutes than invest in a program that will cause more hassle becuase I can't load the plugins that make the song actually sound good.

Again, I have owned Cool Edit Pro through Audition 3. I understand that companies need to make changes to better their software, but I just do not believe it is reasonable to not offer the ability to simply load an Audition 3 file in Audition for Mac.

Hello from London UK. I think the best we can hope for is that a third party creates some software to allow legacy sessions to be used in the Mac version. The other challenge I have is; I work in a team of Producers that share work in the studio and working from home and the ability to put your audio on a flash memory stick and take it home and work on it makes life so much easier - this new version will end that functionality. By the way I have Audition at home on our last surviving pc laptop. Although I did load Audition for Mac beta onto a Mac at work and at least one of the staff gasped with amazement. Again there is no budget to upgrade at work.

I find it saddening that Adobe is relying on third parties to support their own product.

It is going to be 2011 before Adobe officially supports a retail port of Audition to the Mac - nearly 6 YEARS after acquiring Syntrillium Software in the middle 2003. Adobe's own Photoshop has had 4 revisions in that time (The first of which was a port to Mac OS X - in 2003!). Photoshop CS4 went 64-bit on Windows in mid-2008. CS5 went 64-bit on the Mac earlier this year. Mac OS X has gone through 4 OS revisions in that time frame frame.

Audition has had half of the revisions in that time, is just now showing signs of running on Macintosh, does NOT read file types created with ANY previous version and is being "rewritten" as a 32-but application.

The thought of needing a separate Windows computer or purchasing and installing an entire virtual machine just to read and convert files is torturous.

The state of the built-in sample editing filters and effects - some which are outright missing or lacking features comparable to Audition 3.0 - is even more disheartening.

Add me to the list of people who need the software to open the .ses files. I was really thrilled about this release, exitedly downloading it and then the sinking feeling realizing that it doesn't load my years of previous .ses files. I'm not sure why I need to justify wanting to open my old recordings but there's much that I've captured in the past that I want to enhance, tweak, etc.

Opening .ses files is essential for me to even consider buying this. I haven't opened the beta since I discovered this. deficiency

it is the same reason from which I flied over the Beta forums in need of confirmation and justification on official reason about rearranging the multitrack session file format.

It would only be spamming if one wanted to hear personal reasons of mine to use .ses and that is why here is a brief explanation. First of all, happy with the successful download of the software skipping the long-lasting install process present on Windows I excited to launch the software and I did. Audition surely changed, I though, with the discovery of panel "misplacement" and features added. But, suddenly, areas of workflow seemed fairly new even though I knew them for three years now. Then, I thought, I can open an older project and review how and where some parameters appear and lear about the new features that way. The message of unsupported file types shocked from the screen, just a bit really.

Due to financial status on some cooperators at a radio station, where Audition is individually used and bought / borrowed from member to member, we do have all versions of it still working. There will be a problem where one would like to correct or support the other producer with another (older) version of Audition. The files are usually networked on a certain server, but we would not benefit from a cluster upgrade because many error could occour and I could not correct every single .ses since 2002 by myself or even with some help.

Another statement on implementing the legacy format back, is again the financial situation. For a studen radio station such as ours with many audio currrents and ever changing staff members, it is already hard to equip everyone to similar conditions. What would happen, if a firm dependent on budgets of theri cooperators first had to buy Audition from Adobe and later at least 10 copies of third party software. I assume discussion already was taken, but hope on great reconsideration with all the factors in sight - I call you to take you responsibility.

In my opinion, many more aspect are present to demand .ses back, aren't there? If not, what were your main reasons to cut support on it? Why is it so hard to implement?

Big_Yack there has been no mention of paying for 3rd party software. I thought I had made it pretty clear that no matter what else happens or doesn't we intend to implement as donationware a standalone application which would convert in bulk to sesx all ses formats from CEP through to AA3. Our intention is to convert as many internal affects as makes sense for v1.5 & v3 (and maybe v2) or is possible and we will do what we can with external vsts.

We plan to do this as soon as we can establish that AA4 comes out of beta

AFAIK Adobe have let it be known for many months at least that AA users should be saving their sessions as XML and not ses files.

And I guess if you are using a mac then you can't be using AA and therefore wouldn't have any files to import - unless of course you had old ones from when you used AA on a PC. And I guess if they are 'old' then they can't be that important otherwise you would be still using them. And if you are still using them then its because you still have AA on a PC and therefore you can save those sessions as an XML and use them on a mac with AA4.

Yes, batch one-way conversion from .ses to .sesx would be sufficient for me. The way I would use it would be on the rare occasion that I need to re-use or re-issue an old track, then I would convert that single session to modern .sesx. Files would be located in one of many Windows backup volumes dating back to when I had a Windows machine (1990s through 2010).

This plug in is for Windows machines running the older versions, correct? Not for Mac install? I've completely switched over the Mac for the home and office studios...but like many, I work in radio and we've got about a dozen "seats" with various 1.5/2.0/3.0 installs, all on PCs.

Should I be executing this plugin to the corporate (radio) machines (all Dell)? To do the .ses/.sesx conversions for use in AA 4.0 on Mac? Guess I was confused and tried it the other way around....d/l'ed to my Mac Pro at home tonight, opened the .zip and it popped up in TextEdit as gibberish and unable to run in "DOS" :-)....So, am I correct to assume I should be doing it the other way around? From there, is it possible to batch convert everything to sesx? And then transfer all session files to Mac?

Sorry....I'm a bit confused, but not nearly as concerned as others in the thread...as MOST sessions I've done have been mixed out to final and I've moved on (IE, old promos, liners, sweeps, bumps, et al...that won't be needed), and all of my sfx/bed/V/O files are saved in regular library, as .wav(s) not as .ses. I do, however, utilize FCP quite a bit in conjunction with After Effects...and I rely on AA for ALL of my audio production. I own Logic, but don't use it. Audition will be my audio editor of choice. And it's really, really, REALLY cool to completely git rid of my Windows partition on my Macs...which was solely there for Audition and a rare session of Flight Sim X:) Anyway...I digress. Thanks Adobe, this is awesome...and I'm slowly convincing the engineer at the station to augment one of our Prod Rooms with a new iMac and AA 4.0 beta. Who knows?? Maybe we can end our marriage at some point with Dell:-)

"This plug in is for Windows machines running the older versions, correct? Not for Mac install?"

It is a PC application but it should run fine under emulators like Wine (you will need to download mfc42.dll from http://winetricks.org/).

"So, am I correct to assume I should be doing it the other way around? From there, is it possible to batch convert everything to sesx? And then transfer all session files to Mac?"

Sure - download and run on a PC (or mac under an emulator like Wine) - with the registered version you can select multiple ses files and batch convert to sesx. You can then transfer the sesx files to your mac.

You can select to create the sesx file(s) in the same folder as the original ses file or you can select another folder to send all your sesx files to.